Spare, gestural, and enamored with open space, Beatrice Dillon’s work defies easy categorization. The British producer’s latest piece, “Basho,” is longer than most EPs, with a conceptual open-endedness that makes its beginning and end feel slightly arbitrary; the crackling energy she summons could very well last until the end of time. The song’s title refers to an idea pioneered by philosopher Kitaro Nishida of an open field of logic where difference can exist without resolution, what Dillon describes as an “abstract space where all experiences, thoughts, and phenomena are interconnected.” To conjure this zone, the artist adopts a more extreme version of the technique from her 2020 breakout, Workaround: allowing each of the track’s warring elements to flash and recede against a stark background. Dillon approaches the song like a jeweler, arranging dull and glistening sounds into complex strands and fastening them in place with silence. Even as the song reaches white-out flurries of drums and metallic synths, it flickers and vanishes just as suddenly back into calm.

The drama of “Basho” is in hearing disparate parts linked together, yet only intermittently achieving a wonky kind of unity. Organic textures scrape against industrial ones, so that the soft, dewy noises of a terrarium give way to the jackhammering violence of an active construction site. From moment to moment the piece can resemble Barker’s lurching trance, Rian Treanor’s instrumental blasts, and the ambient millipede wriggling of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s GREEN. The song constantly crests, deflates, and begins again. It may not chart the linear progress of a traditional dance track, but every time it recedes and attacks, you arrive at a new understanding of how music can contain extremes without resolving them.